The UC San Diego team is one of only eight university-led teams in the competition which includes 147 teams selected. The IBM Watson AI XPRIZE aims to accelerate the development and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies that are truly scalable and have the capacity to solve grand challenges facing society.

The UC San Diego scientists plan to give some of the world’s most sophisticated computing systems the ability to come up with new ideas and perform “creative machine thinking.”

This work has applications for a wide range of areas, including contextual data analytics, transportation systems, communications networks, studying the spread of infectious diseases as well as malware, cybersecurity, genomic medicine, autonomous vehicles, and the study of the biological brain and neurological disorders.